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#1347: James Dean Bradfield – That’s No Way to Tell a Lie

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After finishing what was to be their last tour for a couple years in 2005, the members of Manic Street Preachers took a little break from each other. During that time, drummer Sean Moore… well, no one really knows, but I’m sure he had a good one. Bass guitarist and lyricist Nicky Wire went and recorded a solo album, released in 2006, called I Killed the Zeitgeist. And in the same year came The Great Western, James Dean Bradfield’s first solo project. Bradfield, as many may know, is the lead singer of the Manics, taking great pride in writing the music of the band’s songs alongside Moore. It wasn’t until 2001 that fans got a completely penned Bradfield song, covering music and lyrics, in the form of ‘Ocean Spray’. So how would a whole album of Bradfield-written tracks turn out? I can’t say myself, I’ve never listened to the whole thing. But the one track I know from there, the album’s opener and selected first single, I’ve enjoyed for a very long time. I guess almost 20 years now, ain’t that something?

I saw the video for ‘That’s No Way to Tell a Lie’ once on TV, and it feels like it was never played again. It most likely was. But if that’s the case, I didn’t see it. The video showed up, not on MTV2 but VH2 when that was a channel in the UK. I was sitting on the floor chilling, as you do when you’re 11 years old, watching Bradfield getting dunked into a lake while another Bradfield in shades watches on accompanied by some Asian mobsters while the song played over the top. I didn’t know what was going on. The song sounded all right, though. The chorus where the title’s sung a couple times left a mark. The visual of the mobsters lip-syncing the “Sha-la-la-la” vocals in the break were funny. The video finished, life happened. I’m sure I kept the song in the back of my mind for a while. But then it got to a point where I couldn’t get away from it later on in 2006, because someone at the BBC decided the track would make good backing music for the Goal of the Month competition on Match of the Day. It was like that for a good two seasons of football. Was singing along to it probably every time. So there you go. I was locked in.

I’ve been singing along to the lyrics and enjoying the music to this for so long now, I’ve never thought to go and really dig deep into what the song’s about. I did always like the “I hear you’ve got something to say / But first you need some people to say it to / Just before you rise from the dead” lines. I don’t know just something to the sound of them. But in Bradfield’s words, the song’s about “the push and pull of your head and your heart telling you different, conflicting things about the way you should feel about religion”. Your head saying, “No,” but your heart saying “Yes”. He says so here. I never would have thought that. But I guess mentions of ‘lost souls on a pilgrimage’ and the ‘rise from the dead’ does give way to that context, with the whole ‘that’s no way to tell a lie’ idea being a flat-out rejection of the religious imagery that sways people to believe in it. Or something? Honestly, I don’t know. I just like the song. Knowing what it’s about doesn’t make me like it any less.

#1299: The Darkness – Stuck in a Rut

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And with this track right here, the end of The Darkness appearing on this blog is marked. We had a good run. There’s a small chance you’d have realised that all the songs by the band I’ve given my thoughts about are all from their 2003 debut album Permission to Land. That’s because I, at least, still have an amazing time listening through it. Plus, I’ve had it since I was eight or nine and the sentimental value’s very high. I’ve said in passing that The Darkness got me into rock music, and it’s the truth. That whole Permission to Land era… Songs like ‘I Believe in a Thing Called Love’, ‘Love Is Only a Feeling’, ‘Christmas Time (Don’t Let the Bells End)’. If it weren’t for them, I’d probably be casually listening to the UK Top 40. So thank God for The Darkness, honestly.

‘Stuck in a Rut’ is the seventh song on Permission to Land, starting on-beat straight after the song before it finishes. I have a good memory of listening to this one on my Playstation 2 a long, long time ago. Years later, I returned to it and found that the melody of the chorus had never left my head. The track is about a burning desire to get in a car of any kind and leave your hometown without looking back. Three of the original members of the band are from Lowestoft, a coastal town in the Southeast of England. I’ve never been there myself, but as Justin Hawkins refers to it as a ‘shithole’ and a ‘sty’, the negative reception doesn’t provide an incentive to go and visit. “Oh, kiss my arse, kiss my arse goodbye” is still a hilarious opening line to me, even though it’s meant in all seriousness. Hawkins uses the American pronunciation of “aluminium” in it too, which confused me when I was younger, but I can understand now because of the syllable numbers. And like all the other songs on the LP, he delivers his vocals with that trademark falsetto and high pitch that you could only imitate and never replicate.

Something I’ve noticed about this song is how much rawer in terms of production it sounds in comparison to the rest of the songs on Permission… While tracks like ‘Growing on Me’ or ‘Friday Night’ have these “big”, layered guitar elements to them. ‘…Rut’, on the other hand, sounds like it was a one-take performance captured live in the studio. The mix overall sounds a lot more closed in than usual, almost as if they’re playing in a small room. If that’s the case, I think it makes the track all that more impressive, especially when considering Hawkins’s vocal performance. Of course, there’s the high pitches and everything. But then there’s the insanity he captures in that adlibbed bridge where he begs his master to kill him, and the last “Yeah” in the song that faultlessly breaks into a whistle tone. It’s awesome, awesome stuff. A deep cut that’s always worth a listen. To me. But it could be to you as well.

#1298: U2 – Stuck in a Moment You Can’t Get Out Of

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1,298 songs in, and we reach the first U2 song. It’ll be the only one, though, sorry. There are people out there who despise the band, mostly because they don’t like Bono. Me? I don’t have anything massive against them. I’m neither here nor there. I can’t say I’m the biggest fan. But they do have some fine, fine songs. When I really started getting into alternative/rock music in about 2004, it was during a time when the video for ‘Vertigo’ was playing almost every day on MTV2. The How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb era. And nine-year-old me thought it was a cool song. So I can sort of thank U2 for getting me into the genre a little more. But today’s song isn’t from that era of the band. It’s from the one that preceded it a good four years earlier. In 2000, U2 returned from an experimental phase during the ’90s with a back-to-basics rock album in All That You Can’t Leave Behind, and ‘Stuck in a Moment You Can’t Get Out Of’ – the second song on there – was released as its second single in 2001.

And this is one of those occasions where I have a clear, clear memory of seeing its music video on TV during that time, even though I would have only been five years old. It was playing on The Box, which was kinda the mainstream UK pop music video channel of the time, and there was Bono on the TV screen rolling around on the floor over and over again. And because I was a child and still had years until my voice dropped, whenever I tried to sing, “Stuck in a moment and you can’t get out of it,” that “can’t get out of it” part was too low for my register. I didn’t have the diaphragm for it yet. For the longest time, in the back of my mind, I thought that if I was able to sing that phrase, it must have meant that the process of puberty had finally happened. I can gladly say at the age of 30, I can sing along to the track just fine. It wasn’t until a few years back that I revisited the song, gave it a few more listens with that core memory flashing in the brain and realized that I liked it a bunch.

Think it’s common knowledge that the track was written as a tribute to Michael Hutchence, a good friend of Bono’s, who was famously known for being the original lead singer for the rock band INXS. Hutchence passed away in 1997 through suicide, the action of which is kind of alluded to by Bono in the song’s bridge (“I was unconscious, half asleep” / “I wasn’t jumping, for me it was a fall” / “It’s a long way down to nothing at all”). Bono, saddened by what happened, wrote ‘Stuck in a Moment…’ as a things-he-wished-he-could-have-said song. He expresses his admiration for Hutchence and is still effected by him even with absence, but wishes he could have told him that whatever tough times he was going through, they would eventually pass and there was no need to feel so down. Guitarist The Edge also gets a moment on the lead vocal near the song’s end with the falsetto on the “And if the night runs over…” section. Though funnily, it gets pushed back into the mix to make way for Bono’s adlibbing. I like this one a lot. A track that reminds you to reach out to your friends in times of trouble. Or just on a frequent basis. ‘Cause you never know what could be happening.

#1262: Pavement – Spit on a Stranger

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So I was talking about Pavement’s ‘Speak, See, Remember’ the other day, another song from the Terror Twilight album, and how I downloaded the LP on the 8th June 2012. Well, at the same time, I went ahead to check the properties of the other song files. It turned out that I had separately downloaded album opener ‘Spit on a Stranger’ a few months earlier, in February or so. Why? Only my 17-year-old self would know, ’cause this 30-year-old doesn’t remember.* But I’m thinking, by the time I decided to download all the other songs, I really liked ‘Carrot Rope’ and I must have grown to like ‘…Stranger’ a lot. So clearly it made sense to. Good thing I did too, because the album is one I can let run from front to back on any occasion. Feels good for my soul.

The image/concept of spitting on a stranger sounds understandably gross and needless, but it goes far more deeper than that in the way songwriter Stephen Malkmus approaches it. The track is a truly earnest falling-in-love song, in which the narrator – lucky enough to find themselves being one of the two involved in the relationship – begins to realize the positive effects this other person has on them, giving the narrator the determination to do whatever it takes to make the relationship work and hopefully last. So what does the ‘spit on a stranger’ phrase actually mean? Well, I think it’s roundabout way of referring to kissing. ‘Cause that’s what happens on dates that go well, I guess. We kiss, and we essentially get our spit on this person we’ve known for a relatively short amount of time. It’s a slightly ugly way to put it. The song is anything but, with the golden guitar work and wispy synthesizer and Malkmus’s sighing vocal delivery. A track to play to a glorious sunset, or sunrise even.

The big question I have about ‘…Stranger’ are the additional vocals on the right-hand side that come into the mix at around a minute and 38 seconds in. Anyone know what’s being said? I don’t, but I always try and sing along to them all the same. They provide a very nice countermelody during the proceedings. Had things gone producer Nigel Godrich’s way, ‘Spit on a Stranger’ would have been the closer on Terror Twilight. His proposed tracklist was put into practice on the 2022 Farewell Horizontal reissue. I’ve gotta say, it works beautifully as “the last song”. Ending the whole record on the line, “I’ll be the one that leaves you high”, would have been very suitable. But introducing the listener to the album’s “world” with the number is something I’m just too used to at this point. I would have only been four at the time of the album’s initial release, but even I get some sort of nostalgic feeling from the song. Feels like one that symbolises the end of the ’90s. And the end of the band during the initial run.

*08/01/26 – Thinking about it now, I’m sure I downloaded ‘Spit on a Stranger’ on its own on the mere fact it was a single by Pavement, and I wanted to test the waters before fully diving into Terror Twilight as a whole. You can see why I forgot, because it was a very simple decision that I thought nothing of at the time.

#1251: Enter Shikari – Sorry, You’re Not a Winner

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Back in the mid-2000s, MTV2 had this show called “Text, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll” where viewers could request what they wanted to see on the channel via their phones and have some banter with the MTV employee/moderator person who went by the name of ‘Moo’, it might have just been ‘Cow’ actually, and had an avatar of the animal next to their messages, all of which appeared on the TV screen. The video for ‘Sorry, You’re Not a Winner’ was showing up on the channel for what felt like every day when it was really popping off, but the chyron that displayed the song name and who it was by was never appearing. Cow admitted one day that the people of MTV2 offices didn’t know what the song was called. So 11-year-old me, with my little cheap mobile, texted in, “It’s called Sorry You’re Not a Winner”. I can’t remember how I even knew that. Must have shown on Kerrang! or something, where they knew the business. Cow said thanks, and I swear from that moment on whenever the video was up, “ENTER SHIKARI – SORRY YOU’RE NOT A WINNER” was popping up on the screen, exactly like in the embedded video above. So you’re welcome, former employees of MTV2.

‘Sorry…’ was the first Enter Shikari track I heard, and I think from the backstory provided in the previous paragraph you can gather that it was because of the music video. The band play in a small, small room amongst a crowd of rabid fans. The energy bounces off band to crowd, the energy’s reciprocated and mayhem breaks loose. It’s quite the classic. The more times the video showed, the more I got into the song. A bit of a Stockholm syndrome thing going on, I guess. But I actually did come to really appreciate it for the great track it was and is. And as 2006 turned into 2007 and more Enter Shikari singles kept on appearing on the TV, it was like “Well, I like all of these.” So I was glad to get that copy of Take to the Skies whenever I did. Probably a birthday or something.

In the almost 20 years I’ve been listening to this song, I’ve never even stopped to think what it could be about. Is that so bad? Guess to some it would be. Just from reading online, some interpretations say it’s a track about gambling addiction. That could very well be the case. But while people are thinking about what the lyrics mean, I’ll be out here headbanging to the riffs and air-drumming. A lot of great moments happen in the track that always scratch the auditory itch. Like the three claps that come in before the verses. The sudden changes between the screams and singing that Rou Reynolds pulls off throughout. The harmonies by bass guitarist Chris Batten, and the back-and-forths between the two vocalists. There’s a reason why it is Enter Shikari’s signature tune. And unlike a lot of similar songs from that era, it’s aged incredibly well.